DARPA Wants a Shapeshifter

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DARPA Wants a Shapeshifter

Computer science isn't exactly a hot area for U.S. students right now. Enrollment in degree programs is plummeting – a sad sign of the times. The folks at DARPA are doing their part to reverse the trend by trying to entice high school students to explore topics in computer science that would be fun, and help the Pentagon.

One of the ideas students liked: physical objects that can morph into different shapes.

A simple example is an antenna that would change its shape based on the communication system to which it is connected. The computer science challenges are to identify the algorithms that would allow each element of the object to do its job as the object changes, while staying well coordinated with the other elements and functioning as an ensemble.

Of course, this idea isn't just for kids. Carnegie Mellon, withDARPA support, is already at work on a synthetic reality project to develop programmable matter. As their website describes:

*The goal of the claytronics project is to understand and develop the hardware and software necessary to create a material which can be programmed to form dynamic three dimensional shapes which can interact in the physical world and visually take on an arbitrary appearance.Claytronics refers to an ensemble of individual components, called catoms—for claytronic atoms—that can move in three dimensions (in relation to other catoms), adhere to other catoms to maintain a 3Dshape, and compute state information (with possible assistance from other catoms in the ensemble). Each catom contains a CPU, an energy store, a network device, a video output device, one or more sensors, a means of locomotion, and a mechanism for adhering to other catoms. *

The power and flexibility that will arise from being able to"program" the world around us should influence every aspect of the human experience. In our project we focus in on one particular aspect of the human experience, how we communicate and interact with each other. Claytronics is a technology which can serve as the means of implementing a new communication medium, which we call pario. The idea behind pario is to reproduce moving, physical 3D objects. Similar to audio and video, we are neither transporting the original phenomena nor recreating an exact replica: instead, the idea is to create a physical artifact that can do a good enough job of reproducing the shape, appearance, motion, etc., of the original object that our senses will accept it as being close enough.

Intel, another partner on the work, goes one step further, suggesting we could replicate whole human beings."The replicas would mimic the shape and appearance of a person or object being imaged in real time, and as the originals moved, so would their replicas," according to their website."These 3D models would be physical entities, not holograms. You could touch them and interact with them, just as if the originals were in the room with you. "